Mattress manufacture typically employs the covering of a resilient spring interior with a fabric cover that provides much of the comfort and the appearance of the mattress product. Such fabric covers are commonly made of quilted material formed by stitching patterns on multiple layered fabrics formed of a layer of backing material, one or more layers of thick filler material and an outer layer of facing material or ticking. Such quilted fabric or quilts are most often formed on multiple needle sewing machines that stitch the layers of material together with stitched patterns that provide both the functional joining of the material that forms the quilted mattress cover and contributes to the ornamental features of the mattress product. Such machines include, for example, that illustrated and described in the commonly assigned U.S. Pat. No. 5,154,130 of Gribetz et al. entitled Multi-Needle Double Lock Chain Stitch Tack, Jump and Thread Trimming Quilting Method and Apparatus, expressly incorporated herein by reference into the description of the drawings below. Such quilting machines sequentially form such quilts by the cooperative motion of ganged arrays of needles and loopers forming chain stitched patterns on a multiple layered fabric web.
Mattress manufacturers produce products that cover wide ranges of price and quality. The price and quality of mattresses are affected by the quality of the spring interior and by the quality of the cover. The cover quality is determined in part by the quality and thickness of the material layers as well as the nature of the quilting process employed. Marketing methods as well as the demands of the mattress market have resulted in a trend toward increased variety in the mattress covers made available to retailers and consumers, particularly in the premium mattress product lines. Such variety is provided by the production of mattress covers utilizing stitched patterns of a wide variety as well as employing a wide variety in the ticking used. This trend, coupled with a general trend in merchandizing toward building products to individual retailer orders rather than to the stocking of inventories, has caused manufactures of mattresses to produce their products on a small order basis, sometimes changing the designs of products, including pattern design and ticking material, after the production of only a small number of, for example every three to ten, products.
The frequent changing of quilting patterns has been provided by quilting machines, such as that of U.S. Pat. No. 5,154,130, by stitching the patterns under the control of a programmed controller, which has the capability of automatically changing patterns from one quilted item to the next, with or without the manual changing of the arrangements of needles in a needle array. For frequent changes in ticking, however, the cutting of the ticking between a supply roll and the quilter is required, then the replacement of the ticking roll with a new roll and the splicing of the ticking from the new roll to either the trailing edge of the cut-off ticking, or to the underlying layers of filler or backing material that make up the fabric web. A typical mattress manufacturer will interchange daily from tens of rolls of ticking or facing material of differing types to up to a hundred or more rolls, particularly where premium quality mattress orders are being produced. Such rolls can contain webs that are over ninety inches wide and may be a hundred yards long or longer. Such rolls are heavy and difficult to handle. The roll changing results in substantial manual setup time, which contributes considerably to quilting machine down time that approaches or exceeds sixty or seventy percent in the industry. Thus there is a need for improvement in the making of material changes in web quilting processes, particularly to increase the speed with which ticking changes can be implemented in mattress cover quilting manufacture.